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"I love that computer science has made mathematics into something like an experimental science. I was never all that good at proving things, but I love doing computer experiments."
- Rudy Rucker
 |
| Rhetorizer | ||
| A computerized assistant for writers. |
Ever needed help with your writing? A pity that you don't have a rhetorizer to help you write on any subject.
| ...he seated himself at the rhetorizer, touched its on-tab...
At the keyboard of the rhetorizer he typed, carefully, the substantive he wanted. Squirrel. Then, after a good two minutes of sluggish, deep thought, the limiting adjective smart. "OK," he said, and sat back, and touched the rerun tab. The rhetorizer, as Colleen reentered the room with her tall drink, began to construct for him in the aud-dimension. "It is a wise old squirrel," it said tinnily (it possessed only a two-inch speaker), "and yet its wisdom is not its own; nature has endowed it-" "Aw, God," Joe Adams said savagely and slapped off the sleek, steel and plastic machine with all its many microcomponents; it became silent. "Dear," Colleen said and sighed. "I only heard you give it two semantic units; give it more to ogpon." "I'll give it plenty to ogpon." He touched the on-tab and typed an entire sentence. 'The well-informed dead rat romped under the pink log.' "When's the speech due?" "Tomorrow night." The rhetorizer, in its cricket's voice, intoned folksily... |
| Technovelgy from The Penultimate Truth,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Belmont Productions in 1964 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the knowledge engine from Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the novel-writing machine from 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) (1948) by George Orwell, the electronic bard from The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age (1965) and the verse transcriber from Studio 5, The Stars (1971) by J.G. Ballard.
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I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
'...it was all composed of tiny, identical cubes, carefully laid to form a tilelike surface.'
'He carried on his person a triggering mechanism sensitive to his heartbeat.'
'...Anything was possible in my imaginary environment.'
'Somewhere in space, a chrome and blue automobile raced the green light of Earth.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair...'
